


light years, light years away

by raving_liberal



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Hunters & Hunting, Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural) Feels, POV Female Character, POV Second Person, Reunions, Unofficial Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 01:36:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18355928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raving_liberal/pseuds/raving_liberal
Summary: The country is only so big and the highways are only so long, but you don’t see the Winchesters for another eleven years, all the same.





	light years, light years away

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [a life in knives](https://archiveofourown.org/works/204400) by [paxlux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paxlux/pseuds/paxlux). 



> I'm a Rav-come-lately to the Supernatural fandom, but paxlux's "a life in knives" really stuck with me. Paxlux, if you happen to see this, I really hope you don't mind that I wanted to see where Ruthie ended up eleven years after the last time she saw the Winchester boys.
> 
> Thanks to geeky_ramblings for being so encouraging and giving this a proofread! Also added some last minute edits from david of oz, who always wants me to capitalize things I don't want to capitalize, and this time actually convinced me to. :)

The country is only so big and the highways are only so long, but you don’t see them for another eleven years, all the same. 

Coming off a five-day hunt, the stitches in your shoulder pulling your skin too tight, you’re ready for a break. Two, three days of downtime and you’ll be right as rain. Can’t stop where the hunt ended, obviously, so you head west, chasing the sun as it treks steadily across the vague blue sky above.

Your passenger seat is empty. You don’t work with a partner if you can help it. Attachments are a liability, though Dean and Sam would have read you the riot act for thinking that, once upon a time, when the big bad wolf ate up everyone and everything that ever mattered to you. The hunter you became is a different breed from the Winchesters.

You’ll never forget the things they taught you, not in a decade, not in a century, but when you see Sam walking out of that gas station in nowhere, Arkansas, you realize you forgot the weight the two of them always carried between them. Without Dean next to him to balance the load, Sam looks burdened and tired, and you wonder _Where’s Dean?_ and you wonder _When did Sam get so old?_

To paraphrase the Beatles, you got older, too. Those first scars on your back are faint and silver, the ghosts of old wounds that linger more in memory than anywhere else. Your skin is an atlas now, marked and tracked by highways crisscrossing in red and purple, east to west, north to south, and one slip-up four years ago that added a new interstate from the Maine of your right shoulder to the Baja California of your left hip. 

Mistakes were made that night, no doubt, but you never make the same mistake twice. You would say the Winchesters taught you that, but if the legends are true, Dean and Sam have become the same mistakes repeated ad nauseum. They were the textbook definition of codependent when you knew them, though you didn’t think of it that way at the time. You could have picked up so many bad habits if you’d had a heart left to grow too fond of them or anyone else. You’re grateful for what they taught you, but you’re also grateful you left them when you did. 

Like the opposite of King Midas, everything those boys touched turned to shit, to rot. Every ally they ever made returned to the dust… except you, and maybe they don't even remember you: little Ruthie Marks, with her roll of knives and no heart. You remember them, though. You dream about them, when you dream. It’s not that often; you don’t sleep much.

You think about calling out to Sam, but he’s with a partner you don’t recognize, a wrung-out dishrag of a man in a crumpled trench coat, and it feels wrong to talk to Sam without Dean, binary stars wrested apart by unfathomable forces. You haven’t let yourself think about them too often, but even after Dean died (but didn’t die, they never seem to die for long, so the stories go), you never imagined them working without each other for any reason but necessity. The hunter network is spotty, scattered and suspicious these days more than ever, but if the great Dean Winchester had finally shuffled off this mortal coil for good, you would have heard, wouldn’t you?

Instead of announcing your presence, you tail Sam and his partner to the edge of town, and you wait there for two nights, stewing in your own juices and eating Clif bars and the good organic fruit leather you have to buy at Whole Foods. You remember what they told you when you left them, about wanting a trunk and a back seat. You stuck to it for the first few years, too, while you got your feet under you and got a feel for the job, the life. In the end, you lost your heart to an old Ford pickup—the boys and their Chevy would be appalled, probably—and you’ve more or less kept her on the road ever since. You have a padlocked tool box in the truck bed, and you never did get so big that the Ford’s lone bench seat is too narrow to bunk down on. Her odometer has rolled over at least twice on record, but she’s still going despite the odds, plucky like you, if a little worn down around the edges, also like you.

You and your Ford wait for Sam and his partner and their butt-ugly old beater (you don’t let yourself wonder where that gleaming black Chevy went), and without realizing you’ve made a choice to do so, you follow them out of town. You tail them to Kansas, lingering far enough behind to escape notice, just another farm truck in the ass end of nowhere. 

Then you reach Lebanon, which you passed through once in ’11, maybe ’12, more an act of dumb sideshow curiosity (geographic center of the contiguous states) than anything else. It never occurred to you to look for Sam and Dean there among the cheap trappings of nostalgic Americana. Maybe that was your mistake, if you had really wanted to find them. You still aren’t sure you ever did until now.

Somehow, just outside of Lebanon, you lose sight of the bird-shat greige monstrosity Sam’s partner is passing off as a car. You round a curve on an otherwise curveless backroad and it’s gone, vanished like magic. Cursing to yourself, you hang a U-turn, drive up and down a four mile stretch for a half-hour before you can admit to yourself you lost it. 

Ruth formerly-known-as-Marks, veteran hunter with over forty werewolf kills, foiled by a hidden driveway. Suddenly, you’re seventeen again and every tragedy is _that_ tragedy, and every blow feels like Dean’s fists when he gave as good as you threw at him, and every missed opportunity feels like Sam holding back because you’re just a girl, a _kid_. 

Here you are, staring down the barrel of thirty, and you’re on the brink of tears because you can’t find a driveway that may or may not belong to someone who cared for you eleven years ago. Pathetic.

You take a room in town, using one of the good cards, one of the ones you know will carry you for a while. You never did get into classic rock like the Winchesters. Your aliases come from your own history, because you like the solidity of it and the distance it stretches. You’re Ruth Frank. Ruth Lazarus. Ruth Ginsburg. Your US Marshal badge says Ruth Midler. If pressed, you would admit it’s your favorite, though you’d say it’s because the photo flatters your angles. 

At some point, you became a knife, and angles are all you have. Everything about you is lean and hard and sharp now. 

The sun goes down as you sit in the cheap motel, wondering why you’re there and trying to decide what you’ll do next. In the meantime, you have a routine that you stick to, crunches and push-ups, and one of those bars that fits into doorways. You do pull-ups dangling half in, half out of the motel bathroom. You practice with every blade you own, then you sharpen them if they need it. You keep your guns clean, because that’s how you were taught, and while you may disagree with some of the finer points of your education, Sam and Dean never steered you wrong when it came to weaponry.

In the morning, you eat at the only dive in town, and you spin a subtle tale of woe about the cousins you lost touch with. You don’t name names, but when you tear up talking about the car your uncle used to drive and all the long summer days you spent riding around in back, the waitress dabs at her damp eyes and tells you, “Well, honey, if you’d’a just said!” and she lets you know your cousins and their friends shop at the market in town in that self-same car.

After that, it’s just a waiting game. You stake out a spot between the market and the post office, because if they’ve got some kind of home base or long-term squat nearby, they’ll probably have a drop box or a PO Box in town. You don’t get any hits on the first day, not Sam or Dean or the dishrag in the trench coat. You sit until long after night falls, then you do it again the next day.

The mail runs at 2PM, and at 3:25, the greige shitbox rolls into a space across from the post office. Sam’s hunting partner goes in, gets their mail, and returns to his car. This time, when you follow him through town, you stick closer than before, nearly on his bumper. You couldn’t say why, since you know better, and everything in your instincts says to widen the gap, stay out of his rearview, but something deeper and older than instinct screams at you not to lose him. 

You almost T-bone the shitbox when it suddenly spins out and swings wide, blocking both lanes. You manage to jerk the wheel and slam the brakes in time, the air turning sour and acrid with your stress-sweat and the burned-rubber smell of your tires. Before you can turn off the engine and bring up a weapon, the guy you’d previously dismissed as a dishrag is at your window with a shotgun in your face. His eyes are bright blue and rabid-fox crazy.

“Why are you following me?” he demands, in a voice full of grit and gravel. He sounds like thirty years of chain-smoking and a punch to the throat. You immediately like him.

“The Winchesters,” you tell him. You try not to lie to people you like, though you still slide your hand slowly down your ankle to your silver boot-knife. 

“What do you want with them?” he asks. You shrug. You don’t want anything, really, apart from maybe the small comfort of laying eyes on them.

“I know them from back in the day,” you say. “They trained me, back at the beginning. When I first started hunting.”

“They got you into hunting?” the man asks, his pretty blue eyes so much younger than the leathery creases at the corners. You shake your head.

“Didn’t say they got me into the life. I said they trained me.”

He nods and puts the shotgun down. You’d think he was being incautious, but he’s got a way about him, a vibe to him that makes you suspect he knows something you don’t. Still, a little trust goes a long way, so you resheathe the knife you slid out of your boot. 

“Come with me,” he says.

“Rather follow you,” you say. “You being a stranger and all.”

“I don’t care what you’d rather,” he says. “You can come with me or you don’t come at all.”

You roll your shoulders and weigh your options. He doesn’t have anything you can’t live without, but on the other hand, you don’t think he’s a threat to you, and this is the first time in eleven years you’ve even come close to crossing paths with the Winchesters. The blue-eyed man doesn’t do any of the things you’d expect to hurry you along. He doesn’t clear his throat. He doesn’t shuffle foot to foot. He looks neither impatient nor uncomfortable waiting. It’s that, more than anything, that decides it for you.

“Yeah, okay,” you say. You back your truck up and drive her over to the shoulder. You slide your G19 compact into the back of your jeans. You double-check your pockets for the usual: salt, rosary, vial of holy water. The silver’s already in your boot. Everything else you need for protection, other than your wits, is already inked into your skin, over and between the scars. 

When you slide into the passenger seat, you finally think to ask him, “So what’re you called anyway.”

He frowns like it’s a complicated question. “My name is Castiel. I’m called Cas, though, usually.”

“Well, Cas,” you say, reaching across the small space between you with your hand out, “I’m Ruth.” He takes your hand and slowly shakes it, like you’ve made a pact over this sharing of names. 

“Pleased to meet you, Ruth,” Cas says. He throws his clunker into gear, and you grit your teeth at how its belts whistle, but you don’t say anything, because names or no names, he’s still a stranger to you, and you don’t insult a stranger’s car to his face.

Even knowing you’re looking for a hidden driveway, you don’t see it. Cas turns his car abruptly right, tucking it onto what looks like a hollow, but is really the loose start of a gravel drive. The road twists impossibly—how can hills like this even exist in Kansas—and seems to spiral first in on itself, then outward again. 

“How?” you ask.

Cas glances over at you, contrite furrowing of his brow. “My apologies. The road in can be disconcerting the first time.”

“Wards?” you ask. “Spells?”

“That and more,” Cas replies, enigmatic and maybe a little amused.

“They’ve moved up in the world,” you say.

“Or down,” Cas says, pulling up in front of a wide bay door set into a low hill, an industrial-looking building looming above. The door lifts to reveal a longer than expected tunnel down into the earth below the hill. When the greige shitbox pulls into a spot in a cavernous garage, you can’t stop the smile spreading over your face.

There she is, that beautiful Chevy, pristine and in a place of honor between other classic cars and motorcycles, many of them covered in tarps. Seeing her again feels like its own kind of reunion. 

“Follow me,” Cas says, so you do. 

As you pass by the Chevy, you drop a hand on her hood, trail your fingers down it, whisper “Hi, old girl,” as you follow Cas from the garage into what appears to be a ridiculous underground lair. 

“Hmm,” you say to yourself.

“What?” Cas says.

“They really have moved up in the world,” you say.

Cas smiles at you. You can’t read anything in the smile, or in any of his other expressions, other than he’s thinking and feeling a lot of _something_. He has one of those faces that is somehow all tell and no tell at the same time. 

When you get deeper into the belly of the lair, Cas calls out, “Dean? Sam?” You hear muffled answers in familiar voices. Your stomach clenches and roils. Maybe this was a bad idea. Cas turns to you with his blue, blue eyes as you come to a stop in front of an ornate door sitting slightly ajar. “Perhaps you should wait here.” 

You nod, unsure what else to say. Luckily, Cas doesn’t seem to expect you to say anything. He widens the opening in the door just enough to slip through. 

“I’ve brought someone back with me,” Cas says. 

You hear the thump of hands on flesh—someone patting a back or clapping a shoulder—and a voice that is deeper and gruffer, but unmistakably Dean’s, says, “Cas, you dog! You got a special lady friend in town?”

That makes you laugh, and even though your hands fly to your mouth to muffle it, a squeak still makes it way out, echoing down the long concrete and metal hallway. The movement and voices in the room behind the door still briefly.

“Cas, d’you make your lady friend wait outside the door?” Dean asks. Booted footsteps approach the door, and you brace yourself for it to fly open. “Come on, man. Have some class. Why don’t you—”

“No, Dean, she’s not my ‘special lady friend’,” Cas says. You don’t question how you can hear the quotation marks, because that’s by far not the weirdest shit you’ve seen today. “She says she knows you.”

“What? Where did you meet her? How does she know Dean?” another voice says, and oh, that’s Sam, still focused on Dean above everything else. 

“Not just Dean. Both of you. She says you trained her,” Cas says. “Her name is Ruth.”

“Ruth?” Sam says. You imagine the broad span of his brow furrowing. 

“Ru— oh shit, _Ruthie_?” Dean says, and the door does start to swing open then, and Dean’s there. He looks the same. No, not the same. He looks like a more comfortable and worn-in version of himself, like your favorite pair of jeans that hug your curves just right, but hasn’t started going thin at the knees yet. You’ve worried you misremembered how green his eyes were, but you didn’t. They’re the warm, herbal green of late summer. 

You’re vaguely aware that Cas has disappeared, melting into one of the many rooms in this underground hideout. You definitely like him. 

“Ruthie,” Sam says softly from immediately behind Dean. Up close, he looks even more tired than he did at a distance. His face is longer and thinner, but also somehow kinder. When he smiles at you, his dimples still pop like they did eleven years ago, and you think to yourself, _oh, I missed this_.

“Holy shit,” Dean says. You’re grabbed and hauled into a hug before you can react. Dean smells the same as he did all those years ago. A little cleaner, maybe, less like sweat and the road. You bury your face in Dean’s neck without meaning to, as he pets your hair over and over, saying, “Ruthie, Ruthie, I can’t believe it, kid.”

“Hi Dean,” you say into the side of Dean’s neck. You’re spun away from Dean and into Sam’s chest. You couldn’t begin to reach his neck, not even now, but you press your face to his shirt and say, “Hi Sam.”

“Ruthie,” Sam says. You haven’t seen him for eleven years, but he drops a kiss onto the top of your head like you’re his little sister come home from college on summer break, like you’re small and precious. 

“It’s just Ruth now,” you say, for all that it matters. Sam’s so thin, _so_ thin. You feel every rib under your arms as you hug him. It doesn’t matter. His arms are still strong, and when you look down, you see a hint of silver peeking from the top of his boot. A knife, just like yours. 

“Jesus, kid, let’s get a look at you,” Dean says. Sam releases you, and they both stare at you appraisingly, the same way they look at their guns when they clean them, or their books when they’re researching, like every piece of you is important and worth taking their time with. 

“You’re all grown up, Ruthie. Ruth. How’d that happen?”

“Eleven years will do that,” you say. 

“Wow,” Sam says, soft and amazed. “It really has been that long, hasn’t it?”

“Where’ve you been, kid?” Dean asks.

“Oh, you know,” you says, shrugging. “Around.”

“You still in the life?” Dean says.

“Yep. Coming off a hunt in West Tennessee,” you say.

“West Tenn— wait, did you work the werewolf pack in Fayette County?” 

You nod. “Somerville. Yeah.”

“We sent people out to that, but they said it was handled,” Sam says.

“By me,” you say.

“Good on ya, kid,” Dean says, punching you in the shoulder like he used to. “You working a lot?”

“I stay busy,” you say. You do. More than busy, sometimes. Not like you have anything else. 

Dean keeps moving foot-to-foot and pawing at his face like he’s fighting the urge to hug you again. You wouldn’t mind, really, but you appreciate that he respects how after eleven years you might have some boundaries when it comes to them. It also comes as a surprise, since he and his brother never really gave much of a shit about boundaries when it came to each other, and only slightly more with other people.

“Where are you staying?” Sam asks you, at the same time that Dean asks, “What’re you driving these days?” The two of them look at each other and laugh, so you laugh, too. Sam points at Dean, says, “May as well answer the most important one first.”

“You sure you want to ask?” you say to Dean.

“Uh oh,” Dean says, chagrined expression. “Just tell me you ain’t driving a Toyota, kid. Anything but that.”

You laugh, and it feels good laughing about something so simple and uncomplicated. “No,” you say. “Worse. A Ford.” Dean places his hand over his heart and staggers like he’s been shot, which sets you off laughing again. You add, “A truck.”

Sam smiles. Some of the years drop off his face, though his eyes stay sad around the corners. “You always said that’s what you wanted. I’m glad you got it.”

“Don’t encourage her, Sammy!” Dean declares, smacking Sam on the arm. “A Ford for chrissake. A _Ford_. Breaking my heart.”

“No, it’s good, it’s good,” Sam says. He puts his hand on Dean’s shoulder, that big mitt grabbing and squeezing like he’ll never let go. Your chest feels warm, seeing it, knowing they’re still good, after all this time, and after all those miles.

“It is good,” you say. “It gets me where I need to go.”

“Yeah, but at what cost?” Dean laments. You and Sam laugh at him hard enough that tears spring to your eyes, and you have to wipe at them before the brothers notice. 

“So where you headed after this?” Sam asks. 

You shrug. You haven’t caught the next case yet, so you’ll probably wander for a while, maybe pick up an odd job here or there, maybe scam a little pool like they taught you. You get called on it far less often than they ever did. Nobody sees you coming. 

“You could stick around, you know,” Dean offers. “We aren’t half bad at this Hunter Central thing. I think Bobby’d’ve been proud.” 

When Bobby Singer died, the news reached you in a small town outside Tucson, Arizona. You know his death had something to do with the creatures popping up around the country wearing familiar faces and full of black goo on the inside. Maybe you cried a little, when you heard. Maybe you drank a few too many at a dive bar in Tucson, picked up the pretty bartender, and made a few poor life choices. 

If you’d known where to find the boys, you would have looked for them then, because you knew what Bobby was to them. You hadn’t seen them in years at that point, though, and those Leviathan things were on the news wearing Sam and Dean’s faces. Some risks aren’t worth taking. Your shoulders are barely big enough to cry on, anyway.

“I don’t think so,” you tell Dean. You let regret that you aren’t sure you really feel seep into your voice to honor what he and Sam used to be to you. “I can leave my number, though. For if any werewolf cases come up.”

Sam smiles and nods like he knew you’d say no, which he probably did. He always had that uncanny read on you, always knew what you were thinking and feeling, and he never judged you for any of it. Dean puts on a cocky grin, but you can tell your refusal hurts him. You didn’t know you still had the power to hurt people. You aren’t sure if you feel guilty or relieved.

“Feed you a meal, at least?” Dean says. 

“Sure,” you say. 

You expect microwave burritos, maybe even a frozen pizza, but instead you end up sitting in their tile-and-stainless kitchen watching Dean flip burgers on an ancient stovetop griddle. Your surprise must show, because you catch Sam watching you with a little smile curling up the corners of his mouth.

“He’s a pretty good cook,” Sam says. “Who’d have thought?”

“I can hear you!” Dean says without looking up from his beef patties. 

“Yeah, ’cause it wasn’t a secret!” Sam shoots back. 

You snicker at the comfortable, familiar bickering, feeling your nose wrinkling up like it used to when May— _no. Stop._ The smile drops from your face in a sudden rush of ice-cold-water feeling. You don’t think about that. You don’t think about her. Eleven years later, that’s your mandate. You avenge, but you don’t dwell. You hunt, but you don’t remember. Not that. 

Sam’s eyes are on you, crawling over your face like guilt. You don’t look back at him. You watch Dean flip burgers, a dish towel slung over his shoulder like a burp cloth. You watch his worn, competent hands placing brilliantly orange slices of cheese on top of the patties. You imagine the life you could have lived, if you hadn’t left the Winchesters in your rearview. You imagine the life you could have lived if they had only showed up a few days, a few hours earlier.

By the time Dean puts the food on the table, all three of you have gone quiet. The meal is a somber affair. Over the last decade, you’ve spun so many versions of the story of why you left the Winchesters. You’ve told yourself it was time to be on your own, that you needed to learn to be an adult, that they were a crutch. You’ve said it was because you knew you’d never be an equal third partner or that you didn’t want to be an obligation forever. You’ve said you left before they could get you hurt. Get you killed. Break your heart. 

No, you can finally admit. You know why you really left them. They saved you. They trained you. They fed you, housed you, cared for you, taught you to drive stick and how to reset your own dislocated shoulder. They loved you, in their own way. None of that matters. They were too late to save your sister, and in the end, you simply couldn’t live with that forever.

When the meal is over, and you’re staring down at the last scrap of bun, stained pink from the medium-cooked burger, you know it’s time to go. You look up at Sam, watching you with his sad, tilted eyes, and you can see he knows it. Dean won’t look you in the face, instead fiddling with his napkin, balling it up and smoothing it out. He was always more precious about goodbyes than his brother. He never could stand being left behind.

“I should probably find Cas, get a lift back to my truck,” you say, already starting to stand. The brothers both hop to their feet. 

“We could drive you,” Dean says, still not looking at you. He doesn’t want to drive you. He can barely stand to watch you leave, let alone carry you away himself. 

“It’s okay,” you tell him. “It’s better like this.”

“Give us your number, at least,” Sam says, holding out his phone. You create the contact ‘Ruth M.’ in his phone, link it to your two most reliable burners, then hand the phone back to Sam. He cradles it briefly on the broad plane of his palm before tucking it away in his pocket again.

Part of you wishes they’d call you. Another part of you hopes they never do.

As you make your way back through the twisting corridors, Sam and Dean trailing behind you, Cas suddenly re-emerges from wherever he’d vanished to before. He looks at you, then at the brothers, then back at you, before fishing his keys from his pocket and nodding his head in the direction you _think_ leads back to the garage. You like that he doesn’t ask any questions. You hope he takes good care of Sam and Dean, and that they appreciate him like they should, and that all of them live a long, long life. You hope they’ll be happy.

You don’t say any of this aloud. 

Instead, you reach up on tiptoes to wrap your arms around Sam’s neck. He lifts you from the ground, and you hang like a monkey as he hugs you. He whispers, “Take care of yourself, Ruthie. Be safe. Be smart,” into your hair. When your feet touch the ground again, you’re barely holding it together.

“I don’t know what to say, kiddo, I just don’t know,” Dean tells you. His green eyes are shiny with tears he won’t shed until you’re gone. It’s just not his way. You hug him, too, letting him squeeze you too tightly, and you realize (when the side of your neck feels wet) that you were wrong about him not shedding tears. Eleven years changed him in as many ways as they changed you. 

You want to tell them thank you. You want to tell them they saved you. You want to tell them every way you’ve tried to repay what they gave you, what they taught you, and none of the ways you tried to move on from them. 

Instead, you just say, “Pussy,” and Dean laughs into your neck, and Sam laughs over Dean’s shoulder, and it’s good. It’s so good. 

Dean sniffles as he finally pulls away, looking to the side while he wipes his eyes with the back of one hand. Sam rests his hand on Dean’s back, thumb stroking through his shirt. You hope that after all this time, however it works between them, that it’s still enough for both of them. You hope they’re whole together, as much as anyone in this life can be whole.

“Well,” you say, and sometimes that’s all there is to say. Dean has already turned away from you, the curve of his body bending towards Sam, before you start following Cas down the hallway. 

You hear their rough-but-gentle voices murmuring to each other as you leave. 

Cas doesn’t talk to you as he drives you back to your truck, and you get the sense that he knows all he needs to know about you, about the Winchesters. You shake his hand before you get out of his car. 

Soon, you’re back behind the wheel of your truck, driving away from Lebanon, Kansas (geographic center of the contiguous states), and you know it, then. You feel it in your gut. The country is only so big, and the highways are only so long, but you won’t see them again. 

You’ll survive.


End file.
